When you leave bananas in a fruit bowl for a few days, they can start to look a bit sorry for themselves.
However, unappealing bananas could soon be a thing of the past when gene-edited crops that do not go brown hit British shelves for the first time.
A variety of the fruit that has had changes made to its DNA has reached the final approval stage before it can be legally allowed to be sold to the public.
The Environment Secretary has approved a marketing notice for bananas that resist browning as they age or are damaged, which allows them to remain edible for longer and reduces waste.
UK company Tropic Biosciences, based in Norfolk, has created the crop and used a laboratory technique known as CRISPR-Cas9 to tweak three genes that cause fruit to brown.
The changes stop the plant from making an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase (PPO) which is responsible for the browning process.
The plant will be allowed to be sold legally in England if Tropic submits the bananas to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) for the usual food safety checks.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) claims that banana browning is responsible for “around 20 per cent of banana yield losses” and preventing such waste would enhance profitability for farmers while improving the shelf-life for consumers.
It adds that the gene-edited variety “is intended for import, retail and consumption purposes akin to conventional banana fruit”.
The PPO enzyme is found in a variety of fruits and makes them turn brown once they are peeled and in contact with oxygen.
With this enzyme turned off, experts say, the bananas will last for up to 24 hours once they have been peeled or cut.
Allowing them to stay fresher for longer means customers can more easily enjoy them in other dishes, such as banoffee pies, fruit salads, smoothies, cakes and pastries.
The tweaks to the banana’s genetic make-up are also thought to make them better able to withstand any bumps or bruises en route to shops.
Current estimates suggest that as many as 1.4 million edible bananas are thrown out each year by British households.
Gene-edited crops are a budding industry in Britain as post-Brexit freedoms have loosened regulations that were previously under stricter EU laws.
Scientists and farmers believe gene editing could allow them to improve yields and profits by growing crops that are more resistant to a changing climate, more robust against diseases, and healthier.
Other crops that have been gene-edited and approved by Defra, officially labelled as precision-bred organisms, include strawberries that produce fruit for longer and “sunshine tomatoes” that are rich in vitamin D.
The Government has also approved submissions from scientists for disease-resistant potatoes, high-fat barley to feed cows, and wheat with lower levels of a cancer-linked chemical.
“All new plant varieties go through testing. These crops will be held to the same standards, if not more so,” Prof Cathie Martin, who leads the lab where the tomatoes were developed, told The Telegraph previously.
Once the products reach shelves, they will not require a label identifying them as being gene-edited. Gene editing involves making small, specific changes to the existing DNA of a product or removing a section of DNA. This process differs from genetic modification, which adds new genes to crops.
The Precision Breeding Act 2022 allows crops to be edited with laboratory techniques, which can include switching genes off, making them inert, or removing them.
This can alter a crop’s traits in small ways that could have occurred naturally.
However, no genes can be inserted from different species as this would be considered genetic modification, which is not covered under the act and is illegal.
Gene editing of animals is also prohibited and not covered in the act.
The FSA has not yet approved any gene-edited foods for sale. Products will only be available in England, as officials in devolved administrations still have reservations about their safety.
Experts in England believe that gene-edited foods are fundamentally no different from traditional alternatives. Therefore, they will not have to be labelled to identify them as gene-edited.
Boris Johnson, in his first Downing Street speech in 2019, said: “As we prepare for a post-Brexit future … let’s start now to liberate the UK’s extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic modification rules and let’s develop the blight-resistant crops that will feed the world.”